MediaTek chips are installed in everything from the Xbox to smart TVs but the company plans to be a major IoT player.

By
Sam Shead
| May 18, 2015

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A vice president at Taiwanese chipset manufacturer MediaTek has called on the automotive industry to sign up to the Open Interconnect Consurtium (OIC) and help drive standardisation across the fast-emerging internet of things (IoT) market.

The OIC is an industry group whose stated mission is to develop standards and certification for devices involved in the Internet of Things based around constrained application protocol (CoAP). It has been set up to help define the connectivity requirements and ensure interoperability of the billions of devices that will make up IoT.

Marc Naddell, VP of Mediatek Labs, said the five founding OIC companies (Intel, Cisco, MediaTek, GE and Samsung) have already demoed a number of standardised IoT technologies at events such as Mobile World Congress but now he wants leading players in other industry verticals to get involved.

“It would be nice to have a car company as the connected car is a part of IoT,” he told Techworld at Digital Shoreditch 2015 in London last week. “Maybe someone in home building would be interesting to have too,” he added.

Naddell, who works in Silicon Valley at MediaTek’s San Jose office, said he’s not aware of any specific automotive companies that have declined to join OIC.

“We’re trying to improve interoperability and security,” said Naddell. “You need to provide that framework so when you design a product you can use the OIC standards and have a compliant environment where these products work together in a secure mode.”

IT analyst house Gartner predicts there will be 26 billion connected devices by the end of 2020 but estimates vary wildly, with some forecasting there could be as many as 100 billion by the same date. Devices set to be connected to internet include everything from kettles and fridges to lamps and air conditioning units.

MediaTek has a vested interest in pushing forward the IoT agenda because it creates the kind of chips that are likely to be integrated into everyday objects as they’re brought online.